Canada’s homeless disaster includes Alberta

Thank you for inviting
me to speak to you tonight. My talk is titled “Canada’s homeless disaster
includes Alberta” because when I thought about coming here I realized
that, with the exception of Ontario, Alberta’s state of homelessness and its
housing deficit is portrayed as a significant crisis and dominates national
media coverage of the issue. Homelessness in Alberta is often depicted as having
some unique features – people who are working and living in homeless shelters, a
high proportion of first nations people and extremely difficult weather
conditions. Then there are the late night visits by your Premier to a homeless
shelter.

I’m going to talk to you
about homelessness, how it connects to health and why a National Housing Program
is, in my opinion, as important a national program to fight for, as Medicare.

I want to begin by
telling you that there is a nursing specialty in this country called
street nursing – that’s what I am, a street nurse, and that
speaks volumes to our country’s need for a national housing program. The term
itself was coined by a homeless man in downtown Toronto who yelled a friendly
greeting at us one day from across the street – “Hey street nurse!” There are
now over 100 street nurses across the country – from British Columbia to the
Maritimes. Our patients are homeless, and to be very blunt, we cannot do much
about their health problems when at times we cannot even find them an emergency
shelter bed. You reach a limit, and as I once remarked, I am not a carpenter.

I have worked in this
area for over 15 years, doing my nursing in drop-in centres, in shelters, on the
street, sometimes in social housing buildings, and in the most unlikely places
like the Home Depot owned land on Toronto’s waterfront that became known as Tent
City.

When I
first started this chapter in my nursing career I was surprised to see men and
women of all ages, all backgrounds – not the stereotypical image of the older
homeless man that I had held. As well, I was surprised to learn and see that
they had just about every health problem you or I could have – not just foot
problems as I had expected. They were, obviously facing some unique challenges
because they did not have a roof over their head, their own bedroom, their own
medicine cabinet, family to care for them – all of the many things we take for
granted.

Street Nursing has been a life lesson for me,
in economics, politics and human rights.

I remember one
of my first lessons. I had heard about a plant closure in Toronto, the Inglis
plant back in the 80s. Several months later I was shocked to see some of the
laid off workers in the men’s shelter – homeless. I was so taken aback that I
realized, to understand my work better, I needed to monitor the Business pages
of the newspaper and also look at how policies like Free Trade were impacting
our economy and on peoples’ lives.

I used to think
about human rights as they might be relevant to starving children, or questions
of discrimination such as racism, or families fleeing military dictatorship or
war or torture. As a Street Nurse, the question of human rights came a lot
closer to home.

I remember the
first time when I could not find a shelter bed for a woman at night and could
only give her a bus ticket so she could get to her favourite
subway grate.

I remember
Eddie Fay, who I sent to the Emergency Department. He was discharged at 2 in the
morning and was found dead hours later in front of a synagogue in Kensington
market.

So, you
probably get the picture I was witnessing what most people rarely heard about.

Things were bad, then all hell broke loose.

In 1993 the federal
government cancelled its national housing programme. To be honest, at the time
I wasn’t following national politics enough to even understand what this would
mean.

In
1995 Ontario’s Conservative government did the same thing, they cancelled
17,000 units under development. They also cut welfare rates 21.6 % and made
significant changes to the landlord tenant act. Other provinces started to
mirror these cost cutting practices.

And in 1996, the federal
government transferred most of its existing housing programs to the provinces
and territories. This meant that our federal government, for the first time
since the end of the Second World War, no longer helped Canadians find or
maintain housing.

In Alberta, major cuts in
provincial housing programs were made, including canceling the seniors’
supportive housing program. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported
in 2001 that Alberta made the biggest cuts, in financial terms, on housing
programs among all the provinces and territories since the 1990s.

So, to summarize, when our
governments suddenly and decisively cut spending and downloaded programs, they
left low and moderate-income Canadians stranded. Prof. Jean Wolfe, of McGill
University, one of the leading experts on Canadian housing policy, had this to
say:

“It
is only in Canada that the national government has, except for CMHC loans,
withdrawn from social housing. The rush to get out ofmanaging existing
projects and building new, low-income housing has taken advocates by surprise.
It was never imagined that a system that had taken 50 years to build-up could be
dismantled so rapidly. Social housing policy in Canada now consists of a
checker-board of 12 provincial and territorial policies, and innumerable local
policies. It is truly post-modern.”

- Prof. Jean Wolfe,
McGill University

The Avalanche

Within months, of the 1995
housing and welfare cuts we saw homelessness essentially double on the streets
and in drop-ins. We were overwhelmed. We saw clusters of homeless deaths. We saw
the return of tuberculosis, more deaths, malnutrition, and more visible
homelessness on the streets in most major Canadian cities, and then also in
towns!

I can’t really begin to
portray the trauma, the damage, the suffering that myself and co-workers saw. We
were traumatized too, although I don’t think we knew it at the time. We were
constantly sharing stories, strategizing and trying to move forward to survive.

Naming the disaster

In desperation, in 1998 a few of
us formed the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. We believed that
homelessness was a disaster.

The World Health Organization
describes disaster as “any occurrence that causes damage, ecological disruption,
loss of human life, deterioration of health and health services on a scale
sufficient to warrant an extraordinary response from outside the affected
community.” For me, the WHO was describing Canada’s and for sure Toronto’s
homeless situation.

We issued a declaration
declaring homelessness a National Disaster and if you check out
www.tdrc.net, the rest is history.

The State of Emergency Declaration

October, 1998, Toronto

We call on all levels of government to declare
homelessness a national disaster requiring emergency humanitarian relief. We
urge that they immediately develop and implement a National Homelessness Relief
and Prevention Strategy using disaster relief funds both to provide the homeless
with immediate health protection and housing and to prevent further
homelessness. Canada has signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights guaranteeing everyone’s right to "an adequate standard of living …
including adequate food, clothing and housing." Homeless people have no decent
standard of living; our governments are violating these Human Rights. Despite
Canada’s reputation for providing relief to people made temporarily homeless by
natural disasters, our governments are unwilling to help the scores of thousands
of people in Canada condemned to homelessness. Morally, economically, socially, and
legally, we cannot allow homelessness to become "normal" in Canadian life.
Inaction betrays many thousands of us to a miserable existence and harms our
society for years to come.

Homelessness is now widely
considered a national disaster in Canada.

We quickly witnessed
widespread “buy-in” to our declaration by national groups, Ottawa, Vancouver,
Victoria and Toronto city councils, and community groups, that this homeless
crisis was a disaster. The United Nations similarly agreed and responded with
statements that reflected a polite condemnation of the Canadian government
policies that allowed the situation to occur.

As one 2000 article noted:
“Tonight, more homeless people per capita will sleep on the streets and in
shelters of Toronto than in several
major US cities. In fact, statistics show that homelessness in Canada’s largest
urban centre is comparable to levels in New York City, long considered the
homeless capital of North America.

-
Canadian Press, 2000

That was then, this is now.

Over the last couple of
years, I started looking at this issue outside of Toronto.

In each community I visit, I hear the
same thing. Food bank shelves are empty. There are not enough emergency
shelter beds for women, and couples. More people are sleeping outside. I hear
about long waits for affordable housing, ranging from 8-12 years. I hear that in
each community a far too high percentage of homeless are First Nations people –
especially in Sudbury. In each community homeless people are dying. The Ottawa
situation was extremely serious – 17 deaths in the first half of the year. In
Sudbury, I saw a community still grieving over the death of Kimberly Rogers, who
died under house arrest, 8 months pregnant.

We now have a number of
circumstances and seasonal responses to homelessness that we should examine.

Cities everywhere, are now
developing ‘community plans’ to deal with homelessness and they are happily
spending what little federal and provincial homelessness monies they can get
their hands on. But they are merely patching up the crisis.

Lots of people care and
lots of people are donating time and money. Churches routinely open their
basements for one night per week, in the winter, great food is served and mats
are laid down for people to sleep on. In the morning homeless people leave and
move from agency to agency. In the spring, the churches are “tired” and close
their doors.

Politicians and
researchers have actually described homeless people as migratory, as if they
were hunters and gatherers, and they use that as an excuse to not open proper
shelters where a person could stay 7/7.

Predictably, every
Thanksgiving and Christmas we see on television the turkey dinner and grateful
shots of grateful homeless people sitting quietly at tables eating.

Charity
obviously does not end homelessness. The private sector has obviously not kicked
in and built affordable, social housing in the last few years. Perhaps one of
the most well known projects, Habitat for Humanity may be able to build 5 or 10
family homes in your community, but these homes will not fix the homeless
problem.

Please remember, we once had
a national housing program – it began just shortly after World War II!
In 1973, which was the start of what many housing
advocates now call the “golden age of housing in Canada”, the
federal government introduced amendments to the National Housing Act with these
thrilling words: “Good housing at a reasonable cost is a social right of every
citizen of this country. . . This must be our objective, our obligation and our
goal.” And the government of the day backed up those brave words with real
action: Over the next 20 years, close to half a million units of good quality,
affordable housing were built throughout Canada. In fact, I live in a
federally-funded housing co-op in downtown Toronto. So, we do have, or at least
we had a proud history of successful housing programs, that provided good homes
in great communities to a great many Canadians.

We are now one
of the only countries in the world without a central government investment in
building affordable housing. We need to change that.

The tale of Tent City – smashing the
stereotypes

I want to end by telling
you about an event that I believe will go down in history. It is an example of
how we work to keep housing on our national agenda.

We are starting to see
self –managed refugee/squatter camps developing in Canada.

Homeless people striving
for a healthier existence outside of the shelter system initiated a Tent City.
Tent City was a squatter’s camp on Toronto’s waterfront, perhaps on one of the
most expensive pieces of property in the country. It grew and grew until it was
140 people. Tent City turned out to be the largest and longest act of civil
disobedience by homeless people since the 1930s depression. Many of the men and
women living there were labourers, drywallers, steelworkers, roofers, or
outreach workers. There were couples and there were disabled people.

Early on a dozen people
asked for our aid. We brought in disaster relief including portable toilets,
insulation, wood stoves for heat and cooking, showers and shower bags. We
actually brought in disaster housing, made in Canada housing, that is used in
other countries that have experienced a natural disaster such as an earthquake.
We also began to experiment, and we brought in a house with a composting toilet
and shower. By then, people were no longer in tents – they were in self-built
shacks, some built to building code, or they were in a trailer or the pre-fab
homes that we brought in on flatbed trucks.

This was a vibrant, or
should I say, lively community. Then, after 3 years they were evicted….and
that’s a long story so I’m going to skip it (note- the movie Shelter from the
Storm tells this story). However protest, public support, media
attention and strong, strong advocacy led to the Tent City people winning a rent
supplement program, and people were finally put into
housing. As of this week, two years later, 100 men and women are housed in
apartments. For communities with a high vacancy rate, rent supplements are an
immediate way to house people. You can imagine what that does to someone’s life
and health, it’s not rocket science. These folks are somewhat healthier, they
are happier, and they are engaged – with friends, family, school, work,
community activities, etc.

A special formula
created this victory:

homeless people that
were always prepared to be interviewed by the media to give a face to the
issue, and to give a profile on an international scale to this national crisis,

activists that were
prepared to do some crazy things,

academics and
professionals and business people that believed in the idea and gave
credibility to our efforts

architects that dared
to experiment with us,

unions and churches
that twinned with this project and gave us money

a film maker that made
a documentary on the whole process (which by the way we sell for a minimal
cost)

a city hall official
who was prepared to use his negotiating skills to leverage money from a senior
level of government to create a pilot program to house the people

But the point of it all was of course to show that
people deserved housing, they had a right to housing, and once housed, they
would not be going back to a squatter’s camp.

I want to end by reading you a poem that Dri reads in
the movie Street Nurse.

Home is where you have your
parents,

Home is where you do belong,

Home is where you got your talents,

Home, your shelter from the throng,

Where your mother taught you love,

Gave first thoughts into your
thinking,

Where from heaven high above,

You have seen the stars blinking,

Where your father is your guide,

Always present when you need him

And the life is gay and bright as

Your home you love to live in,

But just as everywhere things,

When old will have to go,

And so your home will once not be
there

But in memory it will glow.

So, a happy ending to this story, but the battle goes
on across the country, we are still fighting to have housing even discussed at
our national political level.

Thank you for being here and continuing the fight. I
look forward to spending more time with you over the next few days.